Thursday, May 09, 2013

"But EMDs are still very effective. You can still rank high with a relatively small number of "quality" backlinks. I use them frequently.

In a lively discussion within Search Engine land's LinkedIn SEO group Peter wondered:

My new company created a bunch of exact match domains with content only on the home page. The content on each of these exact match domains is pretty much are duplicates of the content found on the pages of our main site. They did this years ago to capitalize on the exact match domain SEO benefit. They were ranking ok before.But post Penguin, as you know, exact match domains have been greatly devalued. What would your recommendation to best handle EMDs? They are still getting traffic from referrals. But because the content is duplicate, would this cause problems?Should we 301, do a rel canonical, no index, or just get rid of them? If we do 301, would Google frown on us?As my friend Jay Lohmann notes: "The response from the community illustrates the overwhelming importance of the domain in general and, more specifically, their quality (length, lack of hyphens, relevancy, TLD type, etc.). I think this caught everybody off guard - Google, the EMD nay-sayers and domain evangelists as well. I dont think anyone REALLY realized how much attention people pay to your Internet Address."